Month: March 2009

Shared Links for Mar 9th

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

The World Without Us is an exploration of what the Earth would be like, and has been like, in the absence of H. sapiens.

This book was as much a look at how we have changed the world as it was an exploration of what would happen were we all to vanish one day.  I especially liked the chapter Polymers are Forever, about the ultimate fate of our plastics, and The Lost Menagerie, a chapter about the missing megafauna of the Americas.  Missing, largely because we ate it.  I thought he could have spent more time on nuclear waste and our laughable attempts to plan 10,000 years into the future in dealing with it.  It would have been interesting to have a chapter on climate change too, in the event that we’ve already tipped it over the edge and into an Eocene like warm period.  Maybe better than anything else, I liked his descriptions of the wild Earth, both before and after us.  I still think we can have such a world without driving ourselves extinct.  But it would take something on the order of his suggestion that we limit our fertility rate to 1.0 for the next few generations.  Down to 500 million people by the year 2150.  Are we up to the task?  This is a real chance to demonstrate that our intelligence makes us special after all.

He occasionally rambles off into technobabble about holographically projecting our minds to other worlds… or other far out stuff, which is doesn’t really serve the purpose of the book, and is distracting to anyone with a science background.  Those lapses aside, the basic message of the book is about the beauty and perhaps the inherent value, of the Earth, even without us here to observe it.  It is an inspirational call to Zero, Now.  It’s heartening that it spent so long on the bestsellers lists, if others got the same kind of message out of it that I did.  If it’s just feeding some apocalyptic peakist zombie trance, well, then that’s less heartening.  Certainly makes me want to visit all the remaining pristine parts of Earth.  Dive the coral reefs while I still can.  Walk in every different kind of remaining old-growth forest.  And keep on composting my urine.

Lesser Political Evils

I’m registered to vote as “decline to state” (a.k.a. Independent… not to be confused with the purposefully confusing American Independent Party).  Under duress (or… on Facebook) I’d describe myself as a “Bright Green Libertarian“.  Alas, in our divisive and quantized system of government, that means I have to choose between the lesser of two evils, for all practical purposes.  The two evils being, so far as I can tell:

  • The Republicans who stand for big government in the name of large, politically well connected corporations and the military-industrial complex, with a healthy dose of social conservatism and uncritical patriotism, in order to garner the necessary votes, while still managing to screw over a lot of the poor and uneducated people who vote for them (as with the intellectuals, if only the rich will vote for you, you’re not going to get very far).
  • The Democrats who stand for big government in the name of large, politically well connected corporations and the military-industrial complex, with a healthy dose of social handouts and nominally “progressive” policies, in order to garner the necessary votes from the economically underperforming masses, but fairly libertarian social views (do whatever you want in the bedroom, and take a puff off the hookah, so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else).

Given these two options, I tend to find the latter more palatable.  The “socialism” that is most troublesome in our society, I think, is corporate socialism.  Corporations have the concentrated lobbying and funding organizations to make sure they get what they want, and plenty of it, so long as the people are willing to go along.  They are the primary economic entities shuffling the chips around.

Which is more fair?  To go with only helping out the corporations and the rich, which I guess you could see as closer to the ideal of limited government (since hey, at least we’re not helping those poor people!), or to say, so long as we’re going to be intervening on a massive, multi-trillion dollar scale, it might as well be spread around evenly.  Both options are bad, but I think the former is really much worse, because it further concentrates power.  The Republican promise of small government is a total sham.  They have no intention (Ron Paul aside) of shrinking the government, of reigning in spending, or of avoiding “entangling alliances”.  That they are still able to get away with peddling that line is a travesty of journalism and public attention span.

So given the unpleasant choice, I’ll take equal opportunity budget deficits, with the consolation prize of getting the government out of the personal relationship and substance sanctioning business, over war debt and corporate cronyism with an unwanted side of illegal wiretapping and extraordinary rendition.

The part of Obama’s administration that (by far) gives me the most hope, is their apparently aggressive moves toward more, and digital, government transparency.  We’ll see what comes of it.

Shared Links for Mar 6th

Dittoheads and Socialists

I have to say, it’s been a long time since I felt like the Democrats did anything politically savvy, but I think running with the recent re-branding of Rush Limbaugh as the head of the GOP qualifies.  Incredibly both Fox and the Huffington Post seem almost to agree on the substance of the story: the GOP is currently in disarray, and searching for leadership.  The dittohead masses that follow Limbaugh are a big enough voting bloc that the party’s current nominal spokesmen cannot be seen to oppose him too much outright, lest he savage them from his bully pulpit.

Continue reading Dittoheads and Socialists

Shared Links for Mar 4th

Shared Links for Mar 2nd